A Quick Word about Dostoevsky

 I've struggled with Dostoevsky, but with both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, hearing it as an audiobook has helped enormously. Crime and Punishment is such a hothouse that its a book I've both warmed to and found 'a bit much' and manipulative. But the more I go back to it, the more I read it, the more of a miracle it gets. It's as perfect a work of fiction as Madame Bovary or Eugene Onegin. Manipulative it might be, but on the terms of its own world, there's not a single wasted word in it. Whereas Karamazov is a collection of towering parts, a loose baggy monster with scenes and ideas that have nothing to do with each other yet thrown together, Crime and Punishment is one idea pursued from beginning to end. Marmeladov's opening monologue contains the germ of the whole novel, and it spools out like a thread from beginning to end as perfectly as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Like The Sopranos, it takes as its foundation a simple crime genre fiction that expands to wrestle the most profound questions on earth. To anybody who is suffering either from sin or being sinned against, it is a balm that tells us that something out there has heard our plights.

Always try again with the great books that don't speak to you yet. When you eventually have the life experience for it, you'll get them, and the fact that you're already familiar with them will make them speak to you that much more quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6F2GlrSVt8